A refrigerator may keep food fresh by cooling a storage compartment based on repeating a refrigeration cycle.
For example, a refrigerator may include a compressor that compresses refrigerant, through a refrigeration cycle, into high-temperature and high-pressure refrigerant. The refrigerant compressed by the compressor may cool air while passing through a heat exchanger, and the cooled air may be supplied into a freezing compartment or a refrigerating compartment.
The refrigerator may have a configuration in which the storage compartment is divided into the refrigerating compartment and the freezing compartment. For example, the freezing compartment may be located at the upper side, and the refrigerating compartment may be located at the lower side. A door may be provided on the front side of the refrigerator to preserve cold air in the refrigerating compartment and the freezing compartment.
A side-by-side-type refrigerator may be configured such that the freezing compartment and the refrigerating compartment are arranged side by side on the left and right sides, respectively. In some examples, the refrigerator may include a single storage compartment that may be located at the upper side or the lower side, and the storage compartment may be configured to be opened by two doors arranged side by side.
In some examples, in order to reduce spread of smell from food to an inside of the refrigerator, the accommodating space such as the refrigerating compartment may include a plurality of storage compartments configured to receive different types of food, and drawers configured to insert into the storage compartments.
For example, a drawer may be slidably discharged forward from the inside of the storage compartment via a slide rail device. One example of such a slide rail device includes a fixed rail, which is coupled to each of opposite inner walls of the storage compartment, a fixing movable rail, which is coupled to each sidewall of the drawer in order to guide the sliding operation of the drawer, and an extension movable rail, which is located between the fixing movable rail. The fixed rail may extend the discharge length of the fixing movable rail and the slide relative to both the rails.
In some cases, the slide rail device described above may increase the price of the drawer due to the use of the sliding rails that overlap each other.
In some cases, the slide rail device may reduce the capacity of the drawer because it may include a number of rails that overlap each other, for example, the fixed rail, the fixing movable rail, and the extension movable rail.
In some cases, a user may need to apply force to the drawer against frictional force between the rails until the drawer is completely discharged from or inserted into the storage compartment.
In some cases, the drawer may perform a linear movement according to the linear characteristics of the sliding rails. For example, the drawer may not discharge in a direction tilted downward, which may make it difficult for the user to view an inside of the drawer in its entirety.